NEW YORK — It had felt so close, yet remained so difficult to cement.
For more than a decade, the Dodgers had aimed for more than just regular-season success. More than just repeated trips to the postseason. More than just a lone, COVID-bubble championship in a pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
This, as president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman had declared time and again, was supposed to be a “golden era of Dodgers baseball,” a generation of organizational excellence unmatched in the storied, but often tortured, history of the century-old franchise.
The fact it hadn’t become that yet was a source of annual internal consternation. So much so, even Friedman’s deep-pocketed bosses became fed up.
As the Dodgers wooed then-free agent Shohei Ohtani this winter — pitching the two-way star and two-time MVP as the missing piece to the team’s still incomplete legacy — it was the club’s Mark Walter-led ownership group that delivered the most resounding message.
“They said when they look back at the last 10 years, even though they’ve made the playoffs every single year, and won a World Series ring, they consider that a failure,” Ohtani later recounted at his introductory Dodgers news conference. “When I heard that, I knew that they were all about winning.”
Indeed, from the fires of past October failures, the Dodgers forged a renewed resolve this year.
And in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday night, it led them to a championship in the most stunning of ways.
Despite falling behind the New York Yankees by five runs in the first three innings Wednesday night, the Dodgers mounted a title-winning rally. They scored five times in a fifth-inning rally fueled by shockingly poor Yankees defense, including a dropped line drive in center field from Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole’s confounding decision to not cover first base.
After falling behind again in the sixth inning, the Dodgers found yet another answer. In the top of the eighth, they loaded the bases against Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle, then hit two sacrifice flies off closer Luke Weaver to take the lead.
The final six outs were stressful, with Blake Treinen taking care of the eighth, and — in another unthinkable turn — starting pitcher Walker Buehler emerging for the save in the ninth.
When the last out was recorded, a club so hungry to add to its 2020 title came pouring out of the dugout, mobbing Buehler on the mound.
They’d finally crossed the threshold of baseball immortally. They validated the golden era they had so long been chasing.
With an 7-6 defeat of the Yankees, securing a four games to one series win, they were once again champions of baseball.
Fighting, scratching and clawing all the way to the end.
